Umbrella Man (9786167611204) (32 page)

Paraguas
. The Spanish word for
umbrella.

Vincent Ferrero was the umbrella man.

Three men in a thirty-five year old
photograph all connected to each other. But connected exactly
how
? That was still the question, wasn’t it?

If one of the three men in the photograph had
something to do with the bombings, did that necessarily mean the
other two, including his dead father, had something to do with them
as well?

That just didn’t make any sense to Tay. His
father had died of a heart attack thirty-five years ago. He
obviously couldn’t have anything to do with the bombings. Yes, his
initials were on those ledgers that Ferrero had been guarding in
the safety deposit box at HSBC, that was true enough, but he still
couldn’t have had anything to do with the bombings.

And why was Vincent Ferrero so worried about
Tay investigating how Johnny the Mover had died? Had Ferrero killed
him? Or at the very least did he know who did?

Tay’s head was spinning. Too many questions.
Absolutely no answers. He was getting a headache.

The obvious thing to do, he supposed, was to
find Vincent Ferrero now that he knew he was the umbrella man and
simply ask him what the answers to all those questions were.

But where the hell did he even start doing
that? Call the American embassy and ask them if Ferrero was there?
Leave his number and ask Ferrero to call him? What kind of a plan
was
that
?

What he really needed right then were a
couple of fresh ideas.

And a cigarette, of course.

TAY SMOKED TWO Marlboros on the sidewalk
outside the Cantonment Complex, then he went up to his office and
spent the rest of the day moving stacks of papers from one side of
his desk to the other.

He was waiting for a great idea about how to
find Vincent Ferrero to drop out of his head and fall face up on
the desktop right in front of him. Sergeant Kang was out doing
something to make it look convincing that they were really
reopening the Mayling Aw case, so mercifully there was no one to
interrupted his paper moving or his waiting. It didn’t help. No
ideas fell onto his desktop, face up or otherwise.

Tay did ring the number he had for John
August again, but August still didn’t call him back. He also called
Goh, but the woman who answered at ISD said Goh was out of the
office and not expected back for several days. Tay doubted that was
true. It was probably what she said to everyone who called asking
for Goh and whose name she didn’t recognize. But whether the woman
was telling him the truth or not, all Tay could do was leave his
number.

If an afterlife existed, Tay had often
thought, hell would not be a place of roaring fires and cackling
demons. It would be a desk and a telephone and no one ever
returning your calls for all eternity. In other words, it would be
pretty much like the life Tay had now on earth.

***

By five o’clock he’d had enough. He hadn’t
had a single original thought all afternoon and the only two people
he knew who were well enough plugged into the intelligence
community to finger Vince Ferrero weren’t even interested enough in
his telephone calls to return them. So Tay locked his desk and
headed out to find a cab to Emerald Hill.

He told himself he was going home because he
could think more productively there, but he knew that was just a
lot of crap. He was going home because he could sit in his garden
and smoke. That was it pure and simple and he decided not to bother
to lie to himself about it.

When he got home, he realized he had nothing
in the house for dinner and he certainly didn’t feel like going out
anywhere, so he walked up to the Cold Storage Market on Orchard
Road and bought two frozen Mrs. Mac Beef and Pepper Pies, a quarter
pound of green olives with pimento, and six bottles of San Miguel,
the real stuff from the Philippines, not that shameful slop they
made in Hong Kong and called San Miguel. He dumped everything in
the kitchen, poured the olives into a bowl, and took the bowl and
one of the San Miguel’s out to the garden. He came back inside,
opened a fresh pack of Marlboros, picked up a lighter, and found a
pad and pen and his cell phone, then he carried them outside too
and settled into his chair all prepared for some serious thinking
and note taking.

He called August’s number one more time just
for the hell of it, and Goh’s, but now neither of them answered. He
dumped his cell phone on the table and leaned back and thought
about what he ought to do next.

Tay had finished the beer, two cigarettes,
and half the bowl of olives when he finally accepted that he had
not come up with a single idea worth writing down.

So, having no better idea what else to do
with himself, he went in and heated the two Mr. Mac Beef and Pepper
Pies in the microwave and got himself another San Miguel. He
grabbed a bottle of HP Sauce to douse the pies and a couple of
paper napkins, then took everything into the living room and
watched the BBC News while he ate.

As usual, the television news was little more
than a lumbering chronicle of depressing disasters, both natural
and man-made. It didn’t enlighten Tay about the state of the world.
It just reminded him why he never read newspapers or watched
television news. If this was what had happened that somebody
thought worth remembering, Tay generally ended up deciding on those
few occasions when he did either, today was certainly a day that
mankind could just as easily have skipped.

He took the dishes into the kitchen, then
made some coffee and returned to his chair in the garden. The night
air was heavy and there was no moon. He lit another Marlboro and
watched the smoke curl away into the darkness.

It was mostly his imagination, of course, but
it almost seemed as if he could still smell the smoke and dust from
the bombs. He thought he could smell the death, too, and the agony
of those who had not died, but might have wished they had.

The bombing of Singapore had already been
reduced to just another chapter in the world’s daily parade of
agonies. Three hundred killed by suicide bombers today in
Singapore, fifty more slaughtered tomorrow in Afghanistan from a
rocket attack on a school, another five hundred dead the following
day in China in an earthquake. Man and nature were equally callous
to the suffering they inflicted, and we had all gotten used to it,
mostly. No matter what awful events transpired, a few days later
more awful events transpired and we all moved on.

No, that wasn’t really true. Everyone
remembered the fires that had burned
them
, just not the
fires that burned others. Here in Singapore no one would ever
forget the bombings. And Singapore would never again be as it was.
The buildings could be rebuilt, and Tay had no doubt they would be,
but the smug certainty that life would smile on them forever here
in their little corner of the world was no more.

Tay was a policeman and he had always known
how fragile life was, that catastrophe visited without warning.
That life was a succession of random turns and arbitrary choices.
If you were standing in the road when the bus got there, it ran you
down. Simple as that.

Now everyone else in Singapore knew it,
too.

Tay stabbed out his cigarette, swung his feet
up on another chair, and folded his hands over his chest. He closed
his eyes. Just for a moment, he told himself, and only because the
death in the air made them burn so badly.

Tay thought about things he could not
remember. Thinking about things he could not remember was what Tay
usually did in the moments right before sleep took him.

What had happened to that red VW he had owned
when he was in university? What was the name of that woman he had
gone out with when he first joined the police force? What had he
done with that green ceramic ashtray that once sat on his desk?

Tay slid over the cliff that separated the
conscious world and the other world for which he had no name, and
slipped away.

***

A sudden sound like someone speaking
befuddled Tay.

Was he asleep and dreaming someone was
speaking to him? Or was he awake and someone was actually there in
the garden with him?

No, it was impossible that anyone was there.
He was alone. He had been alone when he closed his eyes for a
moment and he was still alone. No one had broken into his house,
walked through the living room, gone into the garden, and started
speaking to him. That was stupid. Of course he was alone.

Tay opened his eyes. Or he dreamed he opened
his eyes. He still wasn’t entirely sure whether he was awake or
asleep.

He looked around. It was so dark he saw only
shades of gray. The lighter gray of the patch of sky above his
neighbors’ houses became the darker gray of his garden wall, and
then became the deep, brooding gray all around that seemed on the
verge of swallowing him. One lamp was on in the living room and it
cast a dim glow through the glass panes of the French doors, but
most of the illumination was lost to the gloom before it provided
any definition to the world around him.

Tay bent in the direction of the glow and
lifted his wrist, but he could barely see his watch. It was
certainly too dark for him to read the time.

“Wake up, for God’s sake, Samuel! I’m back,
but I’m in a hurry!”

It was a woman’s voice.

Oh no,
Tay thought.
Here we go
again.

HIS MOTHER WAS dead.

Right after the bombings, he had a psychotic
episode of some sort and the sense of talking to his mother had
been very real, but it had
not
been real. His mother was
dead. And the living did not carry on conversations with the dead.
No one would ever be able to persuade him otherwise. Not
really.

“For Christ’s sake, Samuel, answer me! You’re
acting like you’re as dead as I am.”

Tay cautiously swung his feet down and pulled
himself up straight in his chair. His eyes flicked left and right,
but he saw nothing except gloom.

“Pay attention, Samuel! I’m over here!”

The voice came from his left, over in a
corner of his garden where the banana trees were a little thin and
he had been thinking about planting some bamboo or something else
that grew rapidly to fill out the otherwise thickly planted
insulation of his sanctuary.

At first he saw nothing.

But then he did.

It was nothing more than a swirl of tiny
points of light in an area no larger than a person’s head. The
swirl made him think of a tiny gathering of fireflies, very tired
fireflies, too exhausted to generate anything other than a passable
glow. It was so dim Tay wondered if it was there at all.

“Please say something so I’ll know you’re
listening to me, Samuel. I’m not going to hang around here all
night waiting for you to wake up. I’ve got better things to
do.”

Did the dead have obligations and
appointments like the living? Tay found the possibility
disconcerting. He had always figured one of the advantages of being
dead was that the irritating minutia of everyday life would come to
an end. If all it really meant was accumulating an entirely new set
of responsibilities and commitments, then what was the point of
being dead?

“Goddammit, Samuel, speak up!”

Tay cautiously cleared his throat, “Yes,
Mother?”

“Ah, he lives!”

“How are you, Mother?”

“I was dead the last time you asked and I’m
still dead.”

“I know, Mother.”

“Then why do you keep asking me how I
am?”

“I was just being polite.”

To that, Tay heard a snort so loud it seemed
to echo off the walls of his tiny garden.

“I heard you’ve been making some inquiries
about your father,” the voice continued.

Tay almost asked how she had heard that, and
from whom, but then he thought better of it.

“Yes, Mother. It’s connected with a
case.”

“And exactly how is your father connected to
this case?”

“I don’t know.”

“Then stop asking questions. That seems
simple enough to me.”

“But, Mother—”

“Look, Samuel, I’m telling you to stop asking
questions about your father.”

“But why?”

“Because you may find out things you don’t
really want to know.”

Tay wasn’t sure what to say to that. The same
thought had crossed his mind, of course, more than once, but
hearing the warning coming from a ghost somehow made it more
real.

No, that doesn’t make any sense,
Tay
thought.
Hearing something from a ghost does
not
make it
real.

“You’re not going to pay any attention to me,
are you?”

“It’s not a matter of not paying attention to
you, Mother. It’s just that this case—”

“Yes, I know. You think figuring out the
relationship between the three men in the photograph will help you
find out who killed Johnny.”

“How in the world did you know that?”

“How in the world did I know that? Are you
trying to make a joke, Samuel?”

“No, I was just asking—”

“I know because I am
not
in the world,
as you put it. That’s how I know.”

Tay’s first thought was that she certainly
had him there, but then he quickly had a second.

“So you know everything
I
know?” he
asked.

“And a great deal more, my boy. It’s what I
know that you do
not
know that you ought to be thinking
about here.”

“Why do I get the feeling you’re about to
tell me something, Mother.”

“Because I am. As much as I’m enjoying our
little chat, this isn’t a social call.”

Tay said nothing.

“I’m here to help you.”